


Not The Happy Ending

by rufeepeach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:14:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the few days they lived together, Belle and Rumpelstiltskin did more than just sleep in the same bed: Belle is pregnant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not The Happy Ending

She hasn’t bled.

She asked Ruby about it when she first moved in, when she had the nerve and the other girl had made it clear that she was free to ask anything she needed. She’d had the - utterly marvellous, by the look of them - options for hygiene and comfort at that time explained to her, and was more than ready.

Except the blood never comes.

Belle would not have worried, of course: her body is already behaving strangely due to new foods and new exercise, a whole new world after years in a dark, cold little cell, and her bleed had never been entirely regular.

When she can’t keep down her pancakes, she knows something more is happening.

She counts back, sick and heart pounding, her skin cold all over. She tries to think of any reason, any sickness or event, that could have caused such symptoms.

The midwife in her father’s castle, the old woman with wise eyes, had told the maids and Belle alike of the very same sicknesses. The slight pains and the nausea, the lack of a bleed.

Belle was, of course, a maiden when she’d heard such tales. Just as she had been when she awoke in this land, and found herself unscarred and with the man she loved. But Belle is a maiden no longer.

Rumpelstiltskin had been a gentleman while she stayed with him. They had been clothed when they curled beneath covers late at night, when they took solace in each others’ warmth.

But the first night, the very first night, when she was promising to stay and the town had been destroyed, and he had looked at her like a ghost, like an angel…

It had been easy, like breathing, like the tide. She held him as he shook, and he kissed her as she burned, and when he took her to bed, when his hands glided over her skin and his kisses scorched her lips, she had wanted nothing more or less.

But that had been one night, one night in the middle of a storm, and surely the gods could not have been so unjust?

But the sickness gets worse, and Ruby worries, and still Belle has not bled.

Finally, she confesses to Granny, when Ruby sends her grandmother’s calm words to soothe her. She confesses that she still loves the man she’s left, and, shamefully, that he has touched her, lain with her, and that she regrets none of it.

She expects ruin; she expects shame. But the morals of this world are different, and Ruby and Granny are this world as much as the last, and they do not judge. In fact they hold, they soothe, they rock her through a storm of tears and buy her a little blue stick which will tell her for certain.

But Belle already knows, with or without that telltale blue line. She is with child. She holds Rumpelstiltskin’s baby within her, and she is to be a mother.

Ruby is shell-shocked, reverting to calming platitudes as Granny is practical. She can be rid of it, she is told, the doctors in the hospital are still licensed to perform such a task. She could be free from this, if the burden would be more than she could bear.

She hates it, but the chance is tempting. Belle barely knows this world, barely knows herself: how can she look after a child?

But the child is not just a burden, a practical concern: the child is also her and Rumpelstiltskin, the child is true love and magic and danger and forever all combined and growing within her. However terrifying motherhood may seem, Belle loves this baby already.

She sits and imagines it, the night she decides to be a mother, and sees a girl with her mother’s dimples and her father’s warm eyes, or a boy, slight like his papa and blue-eyed as his mama.

Ruby says he has to know: Belle knows that her friend is right.

She had thought perhaps she would live at Granny’s until Rumpelstiltskin inevitably won her over, until they were perhaps engaged or even married. She had thought that if something were to happen, if they were not to be after all, she would spread her wings and be her own person.

But her life is not her own, not anymore: her life is also her child’s. That seems a much kinder, softer, sweeter kind of surrender than that to a controlling parent or a dishonest, cowardly lover. Yes, she will give her freedom to this child, and she will do it willingly: wherever she goes, her baby will go too.

So together - Belle is not alone, not anymore, not ever again - they go to his shop. He is alone, but not anymore either. Now he has her and now he has their child. Now they are family.

He looks at her with a covered kind of hope. He loves her, he always has and he always will, and the comfort in that is constancy. Because she loves him too, always and forever, and that’s all they’ll ever need, in the end. Honesty and bravery and sacrifice will come later, but love is something that cannot be learned or feigned.

She tells him straight out, without preamble. She tells him how she does not regret what they did, how she does not expect for him to support her or their baby if he doesn’t agree, that she thought he should have the choice.

Because they are not husband and wife, they are not lovers, in some ways they’re barely even friends. They’re just two people who are awkwardly and impossibly in love, and who deep down know each other far too well. He could not want another child, being so desperate in his search for his first son. He could not want to tie her to him, and out of misplaced nobility reject her.

So she tells him, and expects nothing from him, and is halfway through her absolving speech when he cuts her off with a fierce, deep kiss, and a hand pressed to her still-flat belly. He is smiling, and crying, and it’s like a reunion all over again as her hand covers his on her stomach, and the other comes to cup his face, to kiss him again.

They’re together, and they’ll have a baby, and they’re to be married, he says, if she wishes it so.

It’s neither magic nor perfection, and she laughs as she cries. But it’s more than a start, and so much better than a happy ending.


End file.
